Popular deep learning libraries
Currently, the most popular DL libraries are TensorFlow (supported by Google), Keras (led by Francois Chollet, now at Google), and PyTorch (supported by Facebook). Development is very active with PyTorch at version 1.4 and TensorFlow at 2.2 as of March 2020. TensorFlow 2.0 adopted Keras as its main interface, effectively combining both libraries into one.
All libraries provide the design choices, regularization methods, and backprop optimizations we discussed previously in this chapter. They also facilitate fast training on one or several graphics processing units (GPUs). The libraries differ slightly in their focus with TensorFlow originally designed for deployment in production and prevalent in the industry, while PyTorch has been popular among academic researchers; however, the interfaces are gradually converging.
We will illustrate the use of TensorFlow and PyTorch using the same network architecture and dataset as in the previous section...